Exhibitions
Events
On display
Climate Action: Bronwyn Haryward
Professor Bronwyn Hayward MNZM
Talk
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
The second in our series on climate change and environmental action sees Professor Bronwyn Hayward of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talking to us about her area of expertise.
Bronwyn Hayward (MNZM, FRSNZ) is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and director of the Sustainable Citizenship and Civic Imagination Research group. Her research sits at the intersection of sustainability, youth, climate change and democracy. Bronwyn was a member of the core writing team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 (Synthesis report 2023) and co-lead author of Cities and Infrastructure (2022) and lead author of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 Degrees C (2018). She is co-primary investigator with University of Surrey's ESRC funded CUSP: Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, where she leads the CYCLES Children and Youth in Cities Lifestyle Evaluation study in seven world cities. She is a Co-PI of the national Science Challenge Mana Rangatahi, supporting Indigenous young people facing climate change.
Related reading: Talk, Enviromentalism, Free
Exhibition
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
From 24 August 2024
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
Commentary
Pauline Rhodes: Blue Mind
Painted blue and patterned with rust, the thin plywood panels and screens lean nonchalantly around the walls of the gallery and form a skyline of sorts. Across the floor sculptures intersect the space, with groupings of tall rods, waist-high enclosures, clusters of plywood shapes and a small kayak frame on salvaged seaweed and driftwood. Islands for the audience to navigate. The forms are roughly human in scale and relative to the body, generating an intensity and making this an immersive installation to wade through.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Interview
Power Play
In November 2017, Simon Denny’s The Founder’s Paradox opened at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, the first solo exhibition Denny had made specifically for New Zealand audiences in several years. His starting point for the project was local: the news, broken by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in early 2017, that the billionaire tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel was in fact a New Zealand citizen.
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Collection
Ralph Hotere Dawn/Water Poem
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“There are very few things I can say about my work, that are better than saying nothing.”
—Ralph Hotere, undated
